The urgency of developing more sustainable building materials and methods is obvious. Thus, novel building materials such as paper are gaining relevance. Until now, paper in buildings has been used primarily in furniture construction or for temporary structures. The insights resulting from these applications and additional research show that paper also has considerable potential as a building material for permanent load-bearing structures.

For a holistic consideration of paper as a building material, joining techniques must be examined, among other things. Often, glued papers cannot be recycled after their lifespan. For this reason, mechanical fasteners for paper construction should be considered. The goal of this work is to investigate shear-bearing connections of mechanical fasteners in paper both experimentally and numerically/analytically.

Cost-effective and sustainable construction is a hot topic due to the extremely tight housing market and the need to make future construction environmentally friendly. Tiny houses made of paper offer a sustainable and innovative alternative to conventional building materials. Paper as a building material is lightweight, recyclable and has a significantly lower environmental impact, as it comes from renewable resources and can be easily recycled at the end of its life cycle. These properties make it particularly attractive for the construction of tiny houses, which already aim for minimalist and environmentally friendly lifestyles. A life cycle assessment (LCA) is therefore essential to fully evaluate the environmental benefits of paper tiny houses. With an LCA, the carbon footprint as well as other environmental factors such as energy consumption, water consumption and waste generation can be quantified over the entire life cycle – from material extraction to disposal. This allows well-founded decisions to be made that contribute to the further optimization and acceptance of this sustainable construction method.